


You are wearing a wedding ring...

by lizbobjones



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Friends to Lovers, M/M, Marriage of Convenience, Originally Posted on Tumblr
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-11
Updated: 2016-08-11
Packaged: 2018-07-25 17:40:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,522
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7541863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam slammed his hand down on the table, making Dean and Cas both jump.</p><p>“I don’t buy it.”</p><p>“What?” Dean asked, acting wholly innocent, while Cas just tipped his head and squinted at Sam, like they honestly hadn’t noticed this was going on.</p><p>“This whole marriage thing. No one gets accidentally married, and if they did, it’s in Vegas and there’s a divorce right after.”</p><p>“You should know,” Dean snorted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You are wearing a wedding ring...

**Author's Note:**

> [Inspired by/sequel to a non-fic post which weighed on my mind until I resolved it.](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/126010222083/ive-been-amusing-myself-sitting-here-thinking)
> 
> *
> 
> I’ve been amusing myself sitting here thinking about all the sort of dates Dean and Cas have been on over the show. They keep ending up sitting around in bars and cafés for vaguely plot important reasons but then have their yearly heart-to-heart.
> 
> Like, imagine if they kept on doing that, with flimsier and flimsier reasons of wanting the other around for moral support and weirder and more pointless reasons for Sam to go do something else for an hour or so to give them the alone time.
> 
> One time after they’ve been hanging out for a couple of hours, Dean suddenly realises Cas hasn’t said anything about the reason he called him up so urgently, and Cas just calmly says, “Oh, I actually handled it before you got here, but you were already on your way, so I didn’t say anything…”
> 
> Another time Cas shows up at the Bunker when Dean’s having a bad day, and barely gets through the door before he’s dragged back out to the bar, and he never dares ask what’s up and Dean never says, they just sit around and drink and don’t talk about anything.
> 
> It takes them an infuriatingly long time to become self-aware, probably with some help from Sam who would be cool with it if they just said they wanted to go on dates instead of sending him off to do menial tasks any time he’d unfortunately been dragged along to date night because neither of them realised that was what was happening, but after they awkwardly notice what they’ve been doing they sort of have to conclude they’ve been dating since some time in season 8 and they awkwardly never mention the fact that they’re actually probably dating to each other.
> 
> Cas probably urgently calls Dean up to help him with some weird angel problem, only for them to accidentally end up in a registry office and married 3 hours later with no forewarning or discussion.
> 
> They’re probably still too awkward to actually mention it to each other ever again, let alone to other people.
> 
> Angels complaining to Cas about his loyalties and challenging him to say what’s up with him and Dean, and Cas being like “I don’t know he’s an okay guy and I like helping him” while carrying around a fake ID that adorably says “Castiel Winchester”.
> 
> Sam being like “Your husband is coming to help us with this weird monster thing” and Dean spluttering out “What he - I - we never” and Sam all unimpressed “You are wearing a wedding ring.”
> 
> …
> 
> “Shut up.”

Sam finally boiled over the first time Claire came to stay in the Bunker after the unexplained marriage incident.

Specifically, when she paused on her way to the kitchen with her progress blocked by bowed legs splayed across the library - where Dean was sitting at a ridiculous angle with his back almost turned all the way to the table to avoid catching Cas’s eye.

“Move it, Pops,” Claire said, and Dean casually scooted his legs in to grant her passage.

She’d barely stepped out of line of sight when Sam slammed his hand down on the table, making Dean and Cas both jump.

“I don’t buy it.”

“What?” Dean asked, acting wholly innocent, while Cas just tipped his head and squinted at Sam, like they honestly hadn’t noticed this was going on.

“This whole marriage thing. No one gets accidentally married, and if they did, it’s in Vegas and there’s a divorce right after.”

“You should know,” Dean snorted.

“That’s another thing! I managed to invite you to my sketchy love potion Vegas wedding, and then you get hitched to our closest friend and I don’t even find out until I see you’re both wearing rings? And all I get is an ‘oh yeah, I married Cas I guess’ when I point it out? It’s got to be nearly your anniversary and I still don’t know what’s going on. What gives?”

“We weren’t ‘accidentally’ married,” Cas said helpfully, stressing the word with air quotes. He deigned to elaborate, looking over at Dean, who was scuffing his boots loudly and looking around for a hole to die in rather than explain, if Sam knew him at all. Which, this whole marriage incident was testing that thought.

“No?” he prompted.

“It was for Claire, actually,” Dean blurted, and like he’d been unstoppered after holding it in for the most awkward year ever, poured out the rest: “Cas wanted to adopt her properly because it was just getting weird to pretend to be Jimmy every time he had to come bail her out or visit her in the hospital, and it was making them both uncomfortable. So I was just going to help him with a fake ID and stuff so he could have her on his fake health insurance and crap, and she was already nineteen and Jody was her legal guardian so it was literally just that one detail, but then it seemed sort of less creepy if Cas was married and it was a more plausible story for us to be adopting like that and anyway I like Claire and what if she got in trouble again and Cas was on the other side of the country but we were nearby? We move around a lot! So then we got semi-legally married, you know, for a dead guy and someone who’s never existed on paper… It’s just so Claire could be officially Cas’s daughter.”

“Our,” Cas interrupted, possibly because Dean needed to stop for air after that rant.

Dean shrugged.

“And the rings?”

Dean and Cas did an accidental synchronised examination of their left hands. “It seemed appropriate,” Cas said, as Dean spoke over him to say, “Sells the story.”

Sam could feel a headache starting, and they were still dragging him around as a third wheel on their dates-by-any-other-name and then sending him off on a flimsy excuse once they were there. He felt like pushing if only to end this ridiculous farce. “And you’ve not taken them off since, because…?”

Dean and Cas did an accidental synchronised peek at the other’s ring finger.

They had apparently somehow neither of them noticed this detail. For the entire year.

Claire returned with a sandwich during the awkward silence, while Dean sank down in the chair with his ears going red, and Cas stared around the library with the sort of expert level avoiding eye contact only he could do because he really could sell the need to urgently memorise the ceiling tiles. Sam massaged his forehead in despair.

Claire patted him on the arm as she headed back to her seat. “You’re fighting a losing battle there, Uncle Sam.”

The subject got dropped for the rest of the afternoon. The glaring at his stupid brother and stupid brother-in-law did not.

*

Later that evening Cas was in the kitchen watching Sam teaching Claire poker (there was nothing that said they had to be responsible parents to her and anyway it seemed a useful skill to have). He heard Dean approaching down the hall, but the humans in the room clearly weren’t paying enough attention or Dean was being sneaky enough to avoid dull human senses picking him up, because they didn’t so much as turn their heads. 

Cas glanced up to see Dean pause in the doorway and tip his head to indicate Cas should follow. He disappeared out of sight before Cas could get up and leave. Sam and Claire barely paid attention to him when Cas moved from the table. There was something strangely clandestine about it that all their previous meetings had lacked. It was unusually exciting to follow Dean through the Bunker to the garage.

They were ten minutes down the road without saying a word to each other before Cas wondered where they might be going. They knew all the bars, and all the cafés and diners in the town, intimately well. Cas had spent some of the quietest moments of his long existence here, watching Dean silently peeling the label off his beer bottle or wordlessly demolishing a basket of fries. But they were on the road out of town and Cas wasn’t sure what to ask, so he just let Dean drive. 

Dean tapped on the steering wheel in tune to some song stuck in his head, but he didn’t turn the radio on. Cas could hear his wedding ring adding a different pitch to the beat, and it made him look down at his own hand again, admiring the way the lights passing outside the car reflected off its simple, familiar design.

Finally Dean pulled off the main road and followed a track for a short way before stopping. Once the Impala’s lights turned off they were left with just the growing darkness of the evening. Dean stopped to get the cooler out the back of the car, and then with another nod, led the way off-road.

They didn’t go far to find a small lake - it wasn’t particularly scenic, sitting in the middle of the rather flat landscape and with a view back towards the town making a bubble of light pollution in the corner of the sky, challenging the few stars that had started to come out. But it was quiet, and there was a little wooden jetty at the end of the track, that Dean led them on to.

“I saw this place when I was snooping to see what the Bunker looked like on Google Maps,” Dean admitted. “I thought it might be…” He shrugged.

“It reminds me of a dream a long time ago,” Cas said.

Dean wrinkled his nose at how inevitably corny everything they did ended up, and sat on the end of the jetty. Cas joined him and was handed a beer for his cooperation.

“Well, I’m not sure how that nerd figured it out before us, but happy anniversary, Cas.”

Cas laughed as Dean clinked his own beer bottle against Cas’s, but then he winced as Dean used his ring to lever the lid off. He was going to complain about Dean scratching it, but he saw that his face was serious and thoughtful and he was staring at the plain band on his finger just as intently as Cas had been sneaking glances at his own ring all day since Sam had brought it up.

“It’s a good ring, you know,” Dean said. “It’s really practical having a piece of pure silver on your hand all day. If I think someone’s a shifter I just have to pretend I shake left-handed and I can catch them out. Good for punching them later, too.”

Cas laughed again, always surprised by how often he did so around Dean. It was a fonder sort of laugh now. Of course Dean would appreciate the ring for its use in a fight and the silver had seemed the best choice when Cas had picked it out just because of its association with the tools of their trade. It was probably why Dean hadn’t taken it off already, Cas thought, and it made him feel a little sad and distant, his laughter fading. He tipped his head back up at the sky to see which stars had come out, wondering how he could express something so flippant about their marriage to bounce off this. There were a lot of reasons they never talked about the deep stuff, and most of it was because they were just plain terrible at it. But sometimes it was because the depths of what was between them were just too deep to cross.

“You know,” Dean said, before Cas could work out how to navigate this conversation, and Cas looked over to see Dean was still turning the band round and round on his finger. “I do kind of like having the ring. I look at it sometimes, and just think, you know, ‘Wow, I’m married to Cas.’ It keeps me honest… It’s really stupid because, well, that’s all we are.”

“That’s all?” Cas mirrored. 

“Well we are just sort of… married. You know what I mean.”

Cas scowled at the lake. He did; he didn’t get what Dean thought was stupid when he was the one who’d spent an hour before they finally got a meaningless bit of paper that joined their names telling Cas all the ways in which it wouldn’t be what Cas might have thought, after they’d already agreed to do it for convenience. “I’ve had an empty marriage of convenience before, Dean.”

Dean looked wildly affronted for a second that he was only Cas’s second sham marriage and not taking a precious first, before he remembered: “Oh, right. Daphne.”

“In my experience,” he started, before Dean cracked up at the ridiculousness of their lives. Cas glared. Tried again. “In my experience this is far more fulfilling. It might not be traditional marriage, but I doubt I will care for another human as much as you, at least in your lifetime…”

“Gee, thanks, Cas.” Dean was still laughing at him, but Cas ignored it to carry on making his point:

“If you really don’t want anything else, then I’m happy to stay married to you for as long as you like.” Cas held up his hand again to show Dean the ring he was still wearing. Dean made a weird movement like he’d been about to reach out for his hand, but instead he messed up trying to pick up his beer and spilled some on the wooden boards between them.

It was the same ring Dean had worn for years - the same one Cas had made sure was back on his hand when he rebuilt him after dragging him out of Hell. Dean hadn’t worn it in a long time, but after their marriage, when Cas had startled him by actually having a ring he’d gone out to buy while Dean messed around with the paperwork and IDs, Dean had fished around in the Impala’s glove compartment and produced it with very little fuss, dropping it into Cas’s hand with his cheeks burning. Cas knew how much the ring meant to him - that he’d probably only stopped wearing it for the ring’s own protection - so he knew it meant more than Dean would admit to trust him with it. He supposed he could have gained some points of trust by not losing Dean’s amulet, however it had ended up getting thrown away later.

Dean looked betrayed by his own sentimentality: “Okay, so maybe that’s not all we are. I dunno. I’ve only died a couple of times since we got hitched, and you’re still around and all. I never thought I’d get anything like this. Didn’t really want it, the way my life goes when I get close to people. When I agreed to do this I thought it was just for convenience and I was helping you out. But I kind of wanted it. Kind of think, like you… Something like us won’t come around again for me. If it was going to happen…” He shrugged, and downed the rest of his beer to avoid the end of the sentence.

Cas tried to stay deadpan despite the way his heart had begun beating harder, his surprise to hear Dean say something so honest getting the better of his vessel. “So we’re a marriage of convenience for our emotions as well?”

“Basically. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Is that all?”

Dean looked up and scowled at the grin Cas was pointing his way. “What else do you want me to say? ‘Castiel Winchester, will you marry me? Again?’”

“Yes.”

“What, yes, you want me to say it, or… Jesus this is the corniest conversation we’ve ever had. Time out.”

Cas smiled to himself, as they resumed a silent contemplation of the stars reflecting in the water at their feet. Dean needed ten minutes to recover from that conversation and he didn’t mind spending it in silence with him. His heart didn’t slow down: it seemed to beat harder every time he thought about how grumpily Dean had sort of re-proposed to him. The bad-tempered sarcasm sounded a thousand times sweeter than the indifferent, “S’pose we could get married” he’d been propositioned with last time.

Finally from Cas’s left was ventured an uncertain, “I suppose Sam did sound pretty pissed we never invited him. Maybe a party or something wouldn’t hurt. No sappy ceremony.”

“Claire’s already here.”

Dean grimaced. “Though… We’re lookin’ after her because Jody and Donna are on that cop retreat thing. And Charlie’s on her latest ‘I’m so sorry we got you killed’ cruise in the Bahamas. It’ll be weeks before she gets back.”

“That’s true.”

“I’m just sayin’, we don’t want to rush anything.”

“Of course not.”

“We could just… be married for a little while.”

“We’ve been married for a year.”

“You know what I mean.”

Cas aimed his blankest look of calculated incomprehension at Dean, waiting for him to elaborate.

Dean leaned forward, his hand coming to rest on the side of Cas’s face. His eyes searched back and forth between Cas’s eyes, maybe trying to see if there was some trick or hesitation on his part. Cas rolled his eyes and grabbed Dean by the collar to drag him into a kiss. 

Then they weren’t talking not because there was nothing to say, but because there were mouths to explore, hair to bury their fingers in, clothes to rumple just for the sake of for once not touching a shoulder cautiously through three layers of clothing…

When Cas finally let Dean go he was grinning dorkily. “I guess we’re a bit more than ‘just’ married now.”

**Author's Note:**

> [original post](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/126279908608/apparently-reporting-my-mental-screensaver)


End file.
